Iris Murdoch, as Peter J Conradi rightly notes in his introduction, has had "a simplified afterlife". The film Iris (2001) reduced the novelist, who died in 1999 after suffering from Alzheimer's, to "two opposed stereotypes: bonking (younger Iris) or bonkers (elderly Iris)". Conradi's objective is to restore to Murdoch "the one thing about her that was truly remarkable - the freedom of her mind". The other truly remarkable thing about her was the freedom with which she shared her body and, as this book makes plain, there was nothing simplified about Murdoch's sex life.

This edition makes available for the first time a previously unpublished diary and two letter-runs, written between the ages of 20 and 26, when Murdoch was approaching sexual and intellectual maturity during the years of the second world war. The diary, though less interesting, is a touching piece of juvenilia. It covers a blissful fortnight in August 1939 when